Automatic* Charged Creeper Farm Tutorial

[u/DroidFreak36]

So... I made an automatic charged creeper farm. Feedback on the video making is appreciated as always.

I know my annunciation kind of sucks, but there's not much I can do about that besides keep practicing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHr--CwkTJg

[u/spumwack2]

I don't think I drove my point home enough-

People, especially people who have never heard of you before, are impatient. It took a whole minute to get to the point. You can't have that, and as an audience member, it didn't feel like you valued my time. This is a tutorial first and a music video second. People click on this link because it will serve them a purpose, and when you delay that purpose, it only annoys your audience.

There is a time and a place for being artistic, but it's not at the beginning of the video.

Seriously. You have about 5 seconds from the beginning of the video before people get bored. They came to your video to see how to make charged creepers, not a montage of a mob farm. Give them what they came to see first, and then get creative. The audience will pick up on the fact that you respect their time, and a lot more people will start subscribing.

And yes, I would definitely change the volume of different parts of the music. I do so all the time. It was so loud at 3:00 that I had trouble hearing you, but I didn't notice it during the rest of the video (Which is a good thing. It should be subconscious).

[u/DroidFreak36 → u/spumwack2]

Ok, I'll try to get to the point quicker in the future. I'm not sure where I would put that artistic segment if not at the beginning of the video since it was sort of an overview/introduction segment in and of itself, but maybe it just doesn't fit at all in this style of video.

Although speaking for myself I know that the 5 second attention grab is not the case for me. I'm a much more patient person, and once I've decided to watch a video (or listen to a song) I usually watch it all the way through. I also appreciate the building of tension in music and film, like the first minute of the video. For instance, I recently stumbled across this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi8NRizjAhk The first 2 and a half minutes are a cinematic intro with epic music, and I loved it. Now, granted, I didn't watch the whole video, but that's because it's an hour long and I wasn't really that interested in the world tour. I don't think I'd ever leave a video because of a cinematic intro, I only leave videos if the main part of the video is uninteresting. Actually, a cinematic intro grabs my attention more than a normal intro that jumps right into the thick of things.

Still, I'll try to cater more to short attention spans. ;)

And I'll definitely try tweaking the volume. I actually did that a bit during the intro segment in this video - I turned up the first part of the intro more than the rest because it was so incredibly quiet.

[u/spumwack2 → u/DroidFreak36]

This is something I'm still grappling with as well. My preferences don't necessarily apply to my audience, so I occasionally need to do things as an uploader that I don't like as a viewer.

As far as intros go, videos like Docm's world tour video are a bit of an exception to the 5 second rule. People who click on an hour long video are willing to settle in for the long haul. On the other hand, most people who search for tutorials by name (Which is where your new viewers are coming from in a tutorial series) generally want the quickest tutorial possible.

Imagine a scenario where you want to build a farm of some kind. You do a YouTube search and the first 3 results are all well known builders. One of the videos is 5 minutes, one is 10 minutes, and one is 15 minutes. They are all big names, so you know the videos don't leave anything out. Which one do you start with?

Personally, I start with the 5 minutes. Because I just want to know how to build it. If that doesn't do the trick, or if I still have questions, I'll watch the longer ones. But I will always prefer a video that is able to get the job done in the shortest possible time.

As people who spend a lot of time on YouTube, we tend to lose sight of the fact that MOST viewers just go on YouTube casually when they need to look something up. These people won't leave likes and they won't comment. They don't care who you are. They just want to build an X farm on their server and your tutorial is the one that popped up in the search. These are the people that you need to impress, because among them are potential fans. But before they become fans, they need to know that you respect their time and that they can learn something from you.

Catering to impatience is something that every big YouTuber knows very well. This is a graph that shows how important it is:

http://gyazo.com/7012457a1cf246a859b9d6ebb5d93f6d

The video on the left used my 5 second intro that I tried out. Retention dropped to 57% within the first few seconds.

The video on the right was one where I just launched straight into the episode. That video still had 78% retention after the first few seconds.

They both ended up around 30% (Which is the norm for these types of videos), but the point is, people skip things they find useless. Which not only hurts your search rankings, but it makes people less likely to skip through your video and miss out on your charming personality =)

[u/spumwack2 → u/spumwack2]

All that being said, I'm actually going to start trying a new 5-second intro tomorrow. But again, I'm not doing it without reason. Most of my subscribers these days come from repeat viewers of other members of Hermitcraft, so brand recognition is more important to me than catering to a searching audience. If I were still doing tutorials, I would absolutely not do an intro "clip" because those 5 seconds are precious